Writings Reclaimed

I decided to bring posts to this blog from other projects, such as: Digital Learning at PRACE Digital Learning at Lalor Living and Learning ACFE Learn Local Communities of Practice the North-West e-mentor projects from ACFE Learn Local iPad for Seniors at PRACE the 23 Things project from ACFE, CAE and PRACE.   Having written nearly all the text in those places, i wanted gather it all together. It was relatively easy to export from Blogger, and then import into WordPress here. Unfortunately, now i’ve discovered several roadblocks, namely: the Read More …

Skills you may need (blogging)

What are the the basics of blogging? make new blog, with title & web address (URL) hopefully at a time when google is not policing your IP address make new post  add & format text add images make links save draft / publish get people interested in reading your blog post knowledge you may need Ideas for engaging learners with online activities.  Ideas for adapting your already brilliant teaching and learning knowledge into online spaces.  On writing for the web  keep it as visual as possible  make your text very Read More …

Looking back: the last 12 months at PRACE

People often ask, “Why e-learning?”  For me, it’s about providing a strong balance of flexibility and access. Ideally learners (and teachers) can connect with their peers and explore the learning materials outside of set class times and independently of location, in ways that are simple and straightforward. Wherever you are, at a time that suits you.  At PRACE, people continue to explore these themes of flexibility and access in more and more practical ways. Here’s the quick overview of what’s happened at PRACE in the last year. Please tell us Read More …

Phone blog your progress here via our iPadio phonecast channel

This post was originally written by Jill Koppel, as part of our North West e-mentor blog. Below is a phone blog posted by Jill to our North West e-Mentors ipadio channel. Phone blogging is very easy to do – once you’re feeling confident with the technology you could even create a channel for your students to use. Please consider joining us here with your first phone blog. Our iPadio channel is open for business: using ipadio you can call a special number (from anywhere in Australia it’s 1800-802569) from either Read More …

New bloggers on the 23 things project

As well as Ancy and Soheir from PRACE, and Megan from Thornbury.. we now have Trish from Thornbury and Deb from Employment Focus joining us on this adventure. What about going to visit their site.. and offer them support with a comment? Oh go on, do! thanks and kind regards, michael Remember all the course learning materials are online at the 23 Things site. image and photo credits: licensed under creative commons at flickr: Thanks very much: pyjama.

23 Things – intro to blogging

Ancy, Soheir and Megan all valiantly posted their first blog messages to the world. Well done all three of you !! After nearly 40 minutes of michael talking about this mythical “Web2” experience.. it was truly time for some hands-on activity. Interesting to read people’s first impressions of blogging: Ancy said she could see they might be useful in some professions for communication, Soheir said she would need to explore the tool before deciding if it could be useful, Megan’s first impression says the blog wouldn’t measure up to email Read More …

ESL teacher uses "Online Banking" resource

Inspiring adventures from Dale Pobega of Duke St community centre in Sunshine Victoria, who has recently started using blogger to engage and educate his English as a second language (ESL) students. Great to see Dale using the tremendous resource “Online Banking“. This resource came out of Olympic Adult Education about 6 years ago, and remains one of the best online resources for adult numeracy. There’s a few broken elements on the site (eg the bulletin board no longer exists, and the sim bank doesn’t work).. but much of it works Read More …

Yummy Web2 Session

At the recent ACE e-showcase, Michael Gwyther from YUM productions gave a great account of how they have used web2 technologies in one of their multimedia courses. Here’s the list of tools they’ve used: Blog Social Bookmarks (delicious) RSS Feeds Podomatic Slideshare Flickr Video RSS Feed reader! (Bloglines) The key for Michael is RSS feeds. As multiple students post their course reflections and assignments to their blog, he is able to read the updates from a single place .. his RSS feed reader. For a feed reader, i like google Read More …

Taxonomy of blogs, and civility online (radio national)

Browsing the Radio national podcasts, i found this interview and panel discussion: “Author and media analyst Margaret Simons takes a stab at defining the different types of blogs that currently exist.” (The interview follows an article in Creative Economy, where you’ll find relevant other links.) 1) Pamphleteering – often political blogs are like this, with many authors. 2) Digest blog, which aggregates and comments on a range of other stuff, eg from other blogs or from mainstream media. 3) Advocacy, eg telstra – where the company gets their workers to Read More …

Struggle with wordpress

Over at PRACE, we’ve been upgrading our website to wordpress, so that a range of people may author and edit content on the site. Yes it’s taken me quite some time to finally get the thing ready to show other co-ordinators, but it’s a lot of fun to work with the new system. It’s meant i’ve had to upgrade the wordpress on this site, to find out more about how it all works. (Upgrading is an adventure in itself.) .. and now, the editing (wysiwyg) toolbars don’t really work, the Read More …